A few years back, at the Construkt fest, I witnessed an induced networking called “Construkt Collision.” The hall was filled with people, standing. When the conductor of the event says, “Change,” every 1 min, we say “Hi” to the person around us, briefly introduce ourselves and also get to know the other person, exchange business cards, until we hear the next “Change,” after which, we move and meet someone new. It was interesting.

During the “Power of Diversity” week celebration at office, wanted to try something similar, help people meet diverse colleagues they haven’t interacted with and we came up with “Diversity Collision.”

I felt we were not able to achieve active participation in this collision probably because colleagues were shy to reach out to people they do not know or have never interacted with. To overcome this, in one of the offsite gathering, we requested the host to announce and nudge participants to sit alongside someone they have never interacted with and when breaking for lunch, to share the lunch table with someone new and get to know them better. Slight force or nudge helped to break the inertia/shyness 🙂

In hindsight, I thought, we also could have also tried placing a bingo sheet on colleagues desks and asked them to meet, interact briefly and get signatures or names of people, under questions/options like:

• Someone born in specific month
• Someone wearing a particular colour shirt
• Someone from another state/country than yours…etc.